As our late-night-owl readers know, after Twitter reinstated conservative activist Chris Loesch’s account in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning, the progressive flag-spam lynch mob — a vicious group of free speech-squelching Twitter users who trigger automatic suspensions by falsely “mass reporting” conservatives as “spammers” — took him down again and again.

One fun part about Twitter- those who use it for evil tend to be stupid enough to leave tracks by tweeting about it. I basked in the glory of the Zuccotti occupiers having their Twitter accounts used in court as evidence against them.

I still don't get -why- they are bragging about it -on Twitter-. Maybe write a blog post or an email to a friend about how you flagged non-spam as spam. But on Twitter? Where people are looking for you? While using the hashtag and using the little @UserNameIJustFalselyAccusedOfSpamming? I thought they were the smart ones.

Similar kinds of abuse are seen on every user-moderated platform. It bothers me that otherwise competent designers don't include a mechanism for detecting and diverting mob action. Especially since mob action is so easily faked by automation.

In my cynical moods, I suspect that site admins sympathize with the motives of the abusers. Even going so far as to actively assist them.

Agree. And if the site administrators don't necessarily actively aid them, they certainly don't seem to bestir themselves unbidden to remedial action with any alacrity/sense of urgency--so much for "net neutrality." lol.

Family groups at least have to make a case and try and get other viewers to sign on board to their silliness. The Twitter mechanic just requires enough people with an itchy mouse finger (or one person with a lot of time and disposable email accounts).

Having read the tweets that get posted on blogs as newsy, cute even, and having read the tweets of Trayvon Martin and his friend "DeeDee" -- I can only conclude that putting this whole Twitter nonsense to sleep would be "the best thing that happened to corn since the Indians invented it." But Twitter ad income is far too important, like cigarette taxes, so its universe will expand, not contract.

Since anything goes on most blogs and most commentators are not shy about what and how things get said, then why does Google get involved in playing talk cop? Progressives are difficult, make that impossible, to understand.

That's certainly true. The googlebombing craze during the 2004 election was a good example of that. Google clearly knew of the vulnerability, knew how it was being used, and chose to take their sweet time fixing it. That' fine, it's their servers, their rules. But let's not play dumb, guys.

Robin said... Shows the Left's interest in free speech rather clearly. They hate it.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~They are afraid of free speech. They can't argue utopia, that had been already tried and failed in Europe, and did so quite spectacularly. So they lush out with name calling, abuse, threats, spam, etc.